Journey

The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India

Stops (33)

1. Antioch · Antioch — the Mediterranean end

   Where the overland route unloaded for shipment across the Mediterranean, in one of the three or four largest cities of the Roman world. Silk arrived here at prices Pliny found scandalous, and nobody in the city knew where it came from — the Romans believed for centuries that it grew on trees.

2. Palmyra · Palmyra — the caravan city

   An oasis four hundred kilometres from any sea that lived entirely on the desert crossing, with its own merchant families, its own escort militia, and a bilingual tariff inscription listing duty on everything that passed. Palmyrene agents ran ships from the Gulf to the Indus, and one of them left his name in a cave on Socotra.

3. Ctesiphon · Ctesiphon — the Persian middle

   The Sasanian capital on the Tigris, which sat across the route and taxed it, and through which Indian astronomy, medicine and chess entered Persian and then Arabic learning. Khosrow I's physician was sent to India and came back with the Panchatantra; most of the fable literature of Europe descends from that errand.

4. Merv · Merv — the Khorasan oasis

   The junction of the roads from Iran, Bactria and the Oxus, at times the largest city in the world, with Buddhist monasteries in its early centuries and one of the great libraries of the Islamic world later. A Sanskrit birch-bark manuscript was found in a stupa here, two thousand kilometres from India.

5. Samarkand · Samarkand — the Sogdian capital

   Sogdian merchants ran the caravan trade of Central Asia for six centuries and Sogdian was its working language; their letters, abandoned in a watchtower west of Dunhuang around 313 CE, are the oldest surviving documents of the route. They carried Buddhism, Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity east along with the goods.

6. Balkh · Balkh — the Bactrian crossroads

   The mother of cities, where the Oxus route met the roads south through the Hindu Kush. A Greek colony, then a Buddhist centre of the first rank — the Nava Vihara that gave the Barmakid ministers of Baghdad their name was here — and then one of the first eastern Islamic capitals.

7. Bāmiyān · Bāmiyān — the cliff

   Two standing Buddhas, fifty-five and thirty-eight metres, cut into a cliff in the Hindu Kush on the road between Balkh and Gandhara, painted and gilded, with monastic cells honeycombed around them. Xuanzang saw them in 630. They were dynamited by the Taliban in March 2001 over three weeks.

8. Begram · Begram — the hoard

   The Kushan summer capital, where two sealed rooms excavated in the 1930s held Roman bronzes and glass, Chinese lacquer and hundreds of Indian ivories from the Mathura and Deccan workshops, stacked together. It is the single clearest demonstration that the route worked, because all of it is in one room.

9. Khyber Pass · The Khyber Pass

   The gate between the Kabul valley and the Indus plain, and the way almost everything came in — Achaemenid, Greek, Kushan, Hun, Turk, Mughal and Afghan. It is fifty kilometres long and at its narrowest a few metres wide, which is why holding it has always been cheaper than holding anything beyond it.

10. Purushapura / Peshawar · Purushapura — Kanishka's Peshawar

    The Kushan capital at the mouth of the Khyber, centre of an empire running from the Oxus to Mathura, and the site of the great relic tower that every Chinese pilgrim described and measured differently. Its foundation casket, inscribed with Kanishka's name, came out of the mound at Shah-ji-ki-Dheri in 1908.

11. Kanishka · Kanishka — the empire in the middle

    The Kushan ruler under whom this whole corridor became one state, with Mathura at one end and Bactria at the other, coinage carrying Greek, Iranian and Indian deities together, and a court that patronised Sanskrit, Gandharan sculpture and Buddhist councils at once. His Rabatak inscription, found in 1993, rewrote the dynasty's king list.

12. Gandhāra · Gandhāra — the Greek Buddha

    The one place where Hellenistic workshop practice and Indian subject matter fused completely: the Buddha given a Greek face and Roman drapery, Corinthian capitals on Buddhist stupas, and narrative told in continuous frieze. Every standing Buddha image in China, Korea and Japan descends from what was worked out here.

13. Takht-i-bahi · Takht-i-Bāhī — the monastery on the ridge

    The best-preserved Gandharan monastery: a court of votive stupas, a monastic quadrangle, assembly hall, kitchen and cells, built over six centuries and abandoned intact. It survives because it stands on a hill and escaped both ploughing and stone-robbing — its sculpture was taken anyway, and is now in a dozen museums.

14. Butkara & Swat valley · Butkara and the Swat valley

    Uddiyana of the Tibetan texts, a valley of several hundred stupas and monasteries where the Butkara stupa was enlarged five times over a thousand years. Padmasambhava, who took Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, is traditionally from here, which is why Swat is a pilgrimage destination for Tibetans.

15. Takshashilā / Taxila · Takshashilā — the university city

    Three successive cities on the Haro plain at the junction of the routes from Kashmir, Kabul and the Ganges, with a teaching tradition famous enough that Chanakya, Panini and Jivaka are all placed here by legend. What survives is Bhir Mound, Sirkap's grid and Sirsukh, plus a landscape of monasteries.

16. Mathurā · Mathurā — the southern pole of the empire

    The Kushans' Indian capital, five hundred kilometres down the Yamuna from the mountains, whose workshops in mottled red sandstone produced images for Buddhists, Jains and Brahmanical cults from the same yard — and made, alongside Gandhara, the first images of the Buddha in human form.

17. Pātaliputra · Pātaliputra — the Uttarapatha's eastern end

    The road from the northwest, the Uttarapatha, ran down the Ganges plain to the Magadhan capital, and it carried the traffic in both directions: Mauryan administration and Buddhist missions going out, and Greek ambassadors, Kushan coinage and Central Asian monks coming in.

18. Nālandā mahāvihāra · Nālandā — what the road was for

    The destination of every Chinese pilgrim who took this route. Xuanzang studied here for years, Yijing counted its buildings, and its library and debating halls were the reason men walked eight thousand kilometres. What went back out along the road was manuscripts, and the translation bureaus of Chang'an were built to handle them.

19. Srinagar · Srinagar — the Kashmir branch

    The valley was a route as well as a place: from Taxila up the Jhelum and on over the Zoji La to Ladakh and the Karakoram. Kumarajiva studied here, Kashmiri monks translated in China, and Rinchen Zangpo took Kashmiri painters to western Tibet, which is why Alchi looks the way it does.

20. Shatial & Chilas · Shatial and Chilas — the register of the route

    Fifty thousand carvings and five thousand inscriptions along a hundred kilometres of the Indus gorge where the road climbs toward the passes: stupas, hunting scenes, and travellers' names in Kharosthi, Brahmi, Sogdian, Bactrian, Middle Persian, Hebrew and Chinese. Merchants cut their names where they waited to cross.

21. Gilgit · Gilgit — the manuscripts in the stupa

    Where the roads from Kashmir, Chitral, the Pamirs and the Karakoram meet, and where a collapsing stupa gave up birch-bark manuscripts of the fifth to seventh centuries in 1931 — among the oldest Buddhist texts surviving anywhere, several in versions no other copy preserves. Children playing on the mound found them.

22. Hunza · Hunza — the Sacred Rock at Haldeikish

    A boulder outcrop in the gorge below the Khunjerab, carved over two thousand years by people going over into the Tarim — ibex, riders, and names in Kharosthi, Brahmi, Sogdian and Tibetan. The Karakoram Highway was blasted through here in the 1970s and destroyed much of it.

23. Ladakh petroglyphs · The Ladakh petroglyphs

    Carvings along the Indus and its side valleys in Ladakh, from Bronze Age hunting scenes through Buddhist stupas to Tibetan inscriptions — the same kind of record as the Indus gorge, left by people moving along the only practicable line through the mountains.

24. Leh · Leh — the caravan bazaar

    The last town on the Indian side, where the Yarkand and Kashgar caravans halted, paid duty and reloaded, with Central Asian traders wintering in the town. Pashmina from western Tibet came through here and made the Kashmir shawl industry; the route closed in 1949 when Xinjiang shut.

25. Nubra & the Karakoram Pass · Nubra and the Karakoram Pass

    Eight stages above five thousand metres with no fodder, over a 5,540-metre pass — the highest regularly used trade route in the world and one of the deadliest, marked for its whole length by the bones of pack animals. The Bactrian camels still kept in Nubra are descendants of the caravan stock.

26. Khotan · Khotan — the jade oasis

    The first substantially Buddhist kingdom of the Tarim, with its own chronicle claiming foundation by a son of Ashoka and a Prakrit administrative language written in Kharosthi. Its jade reached Chinese courts from the Bronze Age, two thousand years before the silk trade existed.

27. Kashgar · Kashgar — where everything meets

    The western end of the Tarim, where the northern and southern routes around the Taklamakan join and the Pamir and Karakoram passes come in. Xuanzang came back through here in 644 with his manuscripts; a thousand years later the British and Russian consulates faced each other across the same town.

28. Kucha & the Kizil caves · Kucha and the Kizil caves

    The richest of the northern oases, with the earliest major Buddhist cave complex in China cut into a cliff above the Muzat, painted in an Indo-Iranian style with lapis from Badakhshan. Kumarajiva was born here; Kuchean music became the standard ensemble at the Tang court.

29. Turfan & Gaochang · Turfan — twenty languages in the sand

    A depression below sea level watered by underground channels, whose dry ruins have yielded manuscripts in more than twenty languages and scripts. The Tokharian languages, known only from here and Kucha, are Indo-European and closer to Latin than to Sanskrit — in the middle of Asia.

30. Dunhuang, China · Dunhuang — the library cave

    The gateway where the Chinese empire ended and the desert began, with nearly five hundred painted caves cut over a thousand years and a sealed chamber found in 1900 holding some fifty thousand manuscripts — including the Diamond Sutra of 868, the oldest dated printed book in the world.

31. Chang’an / Xi’an, China · Chang’an — the eastern terminus

    The Tang capital and the largest city in the world, with a foreign quarter, Nestorian and Zoroastrian and Manichaean places of worship, and the state translation bureaus where Kumarajiva and later Xuanzang turned Sanskrit into Chinese. The Great Wild Goose Pagoda was built to house what Xuanzang carried back.

32. Pushkalāvatī / Charsadda · Gandhara's first capital

    Pushkalavati at the Swat and Kabul confluence, Gandhara's capital before Purushapura, named in Panini's grammar and besieged by Alexander's general Hephaestion for thirty days in 327 BCE. Wheeler's trench through the Bala Hisar mound found an Achaemenid-period ditch under the Indo-Greek and Saka levels that date the whole north-western sequence.

33. Mankiala stupa · the roadside stupa

    The Mankiala stupa on the Grand Trunk line south-east of Rawalpindi, standing whole in open fields, localising the same jataka as Taxila and Namobuddha. Ventura opened it in 1830 and found relic caskets with Kushan and Roman coins together — which is the corridor in one box: a Roman coin in a Kushan reliquary on the road between the passes and the Ganges.

Sources

• Wikipedia